Tuesday, 22 May 2007

Google action toward the Found Agency gives a strong call to SEO firms. It is time now to review the practices and try to go to the next level ! I have seen many posts in blogs on how to improve your link building strategy. However it is not common to see what not to do ...

As described in the previous posts and as demonstrated by Google , the quality of a link building strategy will now have a stronger influence in a website ranking in Search Engines. All links are not weighted the same. Poor quality links from dodgy sources will have a tiny or even no influence on the search engine rankings. Therefore it is no use to collect thousands of poor quality links because the time spent to look for them and create them, won't justify any improvement.

Based on SEOMOZ's negative factors list, a proper link building strategy should not include any of the following factors! If you find out that your company or your website uses the following practices; it is time to react and try to improve that mess before Google finds out about it.

Here are the factors that might contribute to penalise your website and its ability to rank high in the search engines

1: Similar or Duplicate Content: Copying content from one site to another will deteriorate their value in Search engine and therefore reduce the potential of increasing search engines rankings.

2: External links to low quality/Spam sites: Linking to Spam and low quality sites will tell Google that you are not really trustworthy... Make sure you select the website for links exchanges

3: Overuse of targeted keywords. This factor apply to the link building strategy. Using 10 000 times the same anchor text will destroy all the work you have done building links. Make sure you vary your anchor texts.

4: Participation in Link Scheme or Actively selling links: Found Agency is a great example again with their web counter. The use of a footer 'seo by' in clients websites might one day fall into this category. Paid Links are still controversial but do not seem to be responsible for damaging website rankings.

5: Low quality inbounds links/Spam site: That is the perfect example illustrated by Found Agency... This factor seems to have a strong impact. Do the links 'seo by' in the footer of the clients fall in this category. At the moment it does not seem like it, but it will probalbly change soon.

Before reading all the posts on 'How to create a powerful link building strategy', make sure you are not doing the wrong things already.... Otherwise all your work will be useless....